Our Brexit Moment: Milei's Election in Argentina
How will American politics adapt to global signals that the establishment is on notice again?
Argentina just elected Javier Milei as their president, a man often compared to Donald Trump. I’m getting the same feelings I got during Brexit. Here is why.
You might have never heard of this libertarian economist, former television personality, and tantric sex teacher until today. Recognizable by his signature Beatles-like lambchops, Milei beat Argentina’s center-Left minister of economy on promises to cut spending, lower inflation, slash taxes, and change the country’s currency to the US Dollar. Long claiming he wants to be Jewish, Milei has staunchly supported the US and Israel in the recent war—making him stand apart from other South American leadership. Tucker Carlson viewers will remember Milei as a guest on the show recently.
A few weeks ago, many thought the country would not vote for Milei in their runoff, who appeared mentally unwell and claimed to hear voices in a televised interview. Yet for a man who claimed God told him he would win, maybe those voices were not a disqualifier in the eyes of a voting public.
I met Milei at CPAC México exactly a year ago today and wrote about it for Coda, a magazine founded by former Wall Street Journal and BBC reporters focused on global authoritarianism.
This moment is important for American voters because it could have the echoes of an emerging electoral trend in the way Brexit foreshadowed Trump’s victory in 2016.
Brexit and Memetic Legitimacy
In 2015, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in a referendum known as Brexit. It came on the back of a massive migrant crisis in Europe, where nearly 1 million people entered the continent escaping war and economic devastation.
Downstream from Brexit, Trump won the presidency and other nationalist-populist parties around Europe rose to power. The Sweden Democrats became one of the top two political parties in Sweden, based on a nationalist-populist platform that critiqued Muslim immigration into the country (I wrote about it here for Brookings). The nationalist-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the third most popular party in Germany. Generally speaking, anti-immigrant, right-wing, anti-EU and populist groups that had previously been shunned found themselves as the cool kids again.
In my dissertation (which I am adapting for publication), I call this trend “memetic legitimacy,” when a political trend or movement that is previously unthinkable has a victory in one place, thus giving other fringe movements legitimacy around the world. The success of one spreads that legitimacy to others. Brexit made more bi-lateral, isolationist, and nationalist politics possible and inspiring. It also opened up conversations about who is and isn’t British — with tones of Islamophobia or xenophobia. Trump made it possible for strongmen television-stars to become presidents. Conservative, nationalist or “law and order” candidates like Jair Bolsonaro won in Brazil. Rodrigo Duterte won in the Philippines.
Even despite Trump’s loss in 2020 or Bolsonaro’s loss in 2022, the allure of the populist outsider lived on. It just got one elected in Argentina. It is also part of a current trend I wrote about last week, with 2024 looking more like 2016 every day.
CPAC 2022 as Foreshadow
A year ago today, Milei packed a hotel ballroom room in the upscale neighborhood of Santa Fe in Mexico City. It was the first CPAC to take place in México, the Conservative Political Action Conference that has long been the site of conservative media activism in the United States.
Who else spoke? Nationalist-Populist political personalities like Twitter-warrior Jack Posobiec, the charismatic son of Jair Bolsonaro, telenovela star and then future Mexican presidential candidate Eduardo Verástegui, as well as Steve Bannon (via video because of pending court cases). Political personalities came from Spain, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, and more. There was a surprise video greeting from Donald Trump that drove the crowd wild. Nuns in their habits comprised a significant part of the audience.
The room discussed culture war fodder like trans-healthcare, “woke” politics, anti-abortion activism, illegal immigration, “narco-communism/socialism” and the drug trade. At the time, some of it felt out of touch with the needs of most Mexicans and the tenor of Mexican politics generally — there isn’t even a conception of “identity politics” or “woke-ism” dominating their political discourses. Most of Latin America did not have a political meltdown over vaccination or masks. Instead, security remains the number one political concern of most Latin American countries, not whether or not trans people are getting access to healthcare.
Yet what did draw my attention at CPAC México was the solidarity building of international political personalities coming together, learning from each other’s candidacies, tactics, rhetorics, and experiences. Sharing notes about what does and doesn’t work makes the entire world a kind of petri dish for political experimentation. With both Mexican and American presidential elections in 2024, with huge diasporic immigrant communities voting, this expanding nationalist-populist rhetoric across North and South America has real electoral impact. Now that there is at least one political victory coming out of the CPAC México speaker line-up, we can bet there may be more.
Milei differs from Trump or Bolsonaro in his strict adherence to libertarian ideology. He won, in part, because of a enough-is-enough reaction to the insane level of 140% inflation Argentina has faced (The New York Times writes, “In April 2020, at the start of the pandemic, $1 bought 80 pesos, using an unofficial rate based on the market’s assessment of the currency. This week, $1 bought nearly 1,000 pesos.”) No other politician in Argentina has been able to tackle their economic woes for decades.
In the wake of such inflation, global warfare, and a frustration with a geriatric establishment that isn’t delivering inspiring enough solutions for a modern world, maybe this Argentinean election is also a foreshadowing of what is to come in the US.
Don’t sleep on the political personalities of 2016, New Age populism, and yesteryear. They are coming back today.